The Rules

Since Gareth was old enough to realize that his Dad didn't live near him, we've been having variations of this conversation:

G:    Mommy, why doesn't daddy live with us?

Me:  Because your daddy broke a grown-up rule and now he has to live in time-out.

G:    Why did daddy break a grown-up rule?

Me:  I don't know honey.

Sometimes G presses to know which grown-up rule that Cliff broke, but I've been deftly avoiding that one.  How would YOU suggest to tell your small child about sexual assault of a child?  Also, please temper that answer with the knowledge that you can't be accused of trying to turn your child against his father, even if you're telling him about a crime his father CONFESSED TO.

But last week, G asked me another question that I was wholly unprepared for:

G:    Mommy?  Are you and daddy married?

I don't know who he's talking about marriage with.  It's not something I've brought up, though we may have talked a little bit about it during the closing scenes of Despicable Me 2.  (Spoiler Alert: Gru gets married.)  Wherever this new word came from, though, now we're having conversations about it and it's really hard.  How do I talk to him honestly about why his dad and I are no longer together?  How do I talk about infidelity to a 4 yr old?  

And then, to my grief, the conversations MERGED:

G:    Mommy?  Why aren't you and daddy married?

Me:  Well honey, you know that grown-up rule your daddy broke that means he has to live in time
         out?  The rule he broke hurt me too.  

G:    He broke a married-people rule?

Me:  .....Yes.  He broke a married-people rule. 

So now we're talking about married-people rules, and I've managed to make divorce sound like a really cut-and-dry "Your daddy kissed another person and that's against the rules so now we're not married."  As if that even gets close to the heart of why our marriage died.  As if that even gets close to the heart of how marriages work or don't work.  I've boiled marriage covenant down to rules we're supposed to follow and I feel like a parenting failure.

Really though, HOW am I supposed to talk about marriage and it's covenant heart with a 4yr old?  I know it is more than "rules" to follow, but it IS made up of promises that function like rules.  I don't want to raise a legalist because there's too much grief in growing up with the belief that life follows straight lines and then discovering life actually operates more like unpredictable weather patterns.  But I do want to raise him with some kind of understanding of the "operating procedures" of existence.  "If you promise to kiss only one person, you shouldn't kiss other people" seems like a pretty good operating procedure to lay out early on.  Right?

Parenting is hard.  Even more so, now that the discussion du-jour in the interwebs is "raising boys who understand consent and advocate for women."  Y'all - obviously I'm on board.  I'm a single mom who is also a PASTOR.  I'm not purposefully raising a mens-rights activist.  But would you believe I'm ALREADY having to reprogram him in regard to gender stereotypes?  Yesterday we had a conversation about why girls don't always like hearts and pink stuff, that boys can like hearts and girls can like spider-man and your gender doesn't determine what you like.  HE IS 4 AND I'M ALREADY HAVING THIS CONVERSATION.

So on top of teaching him how to be a functional human ("Please use your fork to eat that spaghetti"), I'm also teaching him how to be egalitarian in a culture that marginalizes and stigmatizes femaleness ("There's no such thing as a 'Boy' or 'Girl' toy, just toys YOU like").  And now I'm having to teach him about marital covenants and why people end up in jail?  Let me tell you - there isn't a lot of childhood literature about how to cover those topics.

::Sigh::

There's a bible verse, "Train children in the right way, and when old, they will not stray."  Well folks, that's easier said than done. Oftentimes, the right way only becomes visible after you've gotten cut in the brambles of a not-so-right path.  And right now I feel cut up and frustrated.  I expected this parenting business to be a complicated matter, but now I'm living in a present moment caused directly by Cliff's violation of our "married-people rules" and all I feel is exasperated.  I'm usually pretty good at finding the right words, but right now it seems like they've all fled to the hinterlands, leaving me bereft.

I'll manage, because I have to.  But in the meantime, please be merciful when you overhear G and I talk.  He's asking questions that deserve answers, and I'm making up language as I go.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_picture_is_worth_a_thousand_words.jpg

She's Got Fever

I sat on the floor of the bathroom, my arms thrown up on the side of the bathtub and my forehead resting on my forearms.  Gareth played delightedly with cups and toys, water spilling and cries of "Jump into the pool!" sounding and it was all I could do just stay to stay semi-upright.  

I was so hot.  

And not in the "My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard" kind of way.

Later that night, after I'd put Gareth to bed and managed to find my way to bed, I took my temperature and it read 103.8.  I'd been running a fever for 60 hours at that point, despite having had antiobiotcs for 48 of them.  

I was so hot.

Sitting on the bathroom floor, the only clear thought I remember having was "Thank God for birthcontrol."

I'll explain.

Before Cliff's trial began, before he confessed, before I knew the truth of things, we were planning on trying to have another baby after the trial concluded.  We both wanted more than one child and it would have been a good time to start anyway; chances are I would get pregnant quickly and we would have an August baby which would miss Easter and Christmas obligations at church.

I decided we couldn't take the chance on getting pregnant if he did end up going to jail, so I remained on birth control.  Birth control that I was able to get prescribed by my doctor because my doctor wasn't being horrifyingly strong armed by a hospital system like this one: (http://freethoughtblogs.com/almostdiamonds/2014/03/29/a-town-without-contraception/).  Birth Control that I was able to get cheaply because I was fortunate enought to have health insurance pay most of the costs on it.

Thank God for birthcontrol and my ability to get it. Because if I hadn't had free access to it, my apparant fertility almost guaranteed that I would have already been pregnant with another child by the time Cliff went to jail, let alone afterwards.  And my life would be so so so much harder than it already is.  

I grieve the possibility that Gareth will be my only child.  I never expected a "first-and-last" pregnancy.  But as life is now, as a single mom, as the only bread-winner, as the bearer of "all-the-responsibility", it is the best possible future we could have had.  Because he can withstand several days of repeating netflix cartoons while I lie, bleary-eyed on the couch trying to withstand raging fevers.  But a younger child too?  I don't know how I would do it.  With family so far away, with funds so limited, with my attention so necessarily frayed.

---

I'll be brutally honest here: I now understand why some women choose abortions.

I'm a single mom of only one child, I make substantianlly more than minimum wage, and it is still very very financially difficult to make ends meet.  Despite the help I know I could get from family.

Can you imagine?  A woman much like me, but with less education, with a lower paying job, with one child, with no health insurance and little access to birth control, who suddenly finds herself single-parenting and also pregnant?  I can imagine.  The desperation.  The nauseating knowledge that this is an impossible problem.  There are some agencies that can help, but not long-term.  And they certainly won't be there when she's sick with a 103 fever and she has to feed and bathe a 4yr old and 2yr old and she can't move from the floor of the bathroom where she's collapsed.  

If I had turned up pregnant after Cliff was incarcerated (and I was desperately afraid that would happen), abortion would have been something I considered.  And y'all, I'm an ordained Christian minister.  I believe life is sacred, I do.

But sometimes, sometimes life is just terrible.  And sometimes your only choices are all painful.

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This is difficult stuff folks, I know.  I don't expect consensus or even many to agree with me.  But if you sit in a place of privelege, like a family with 2 parents who are both employed, or a family with 2 parents where one parent can stay home; if you have never had to live under the strain of difficult finances; if you have never had to consider your future in light of no access to healthcare; if you have never had medical choices stripped from you; if you have never had to rebuild your life after it has been destroyed....

Choose mercy.  And compassion.  And remember that out in the world right now, there are single mothers and single fathers laying prone on bathroom floors, feverish and weak, trying to gather enough strength to feed their kids and then just survive till they're well again.  Sometimes their (my) best choices may give you pause.  But what they (we) don't need from you are picket signs, self-righteous editorials about our "moral failings", legislation that makes it harder to get even basic medical help.  What they (we) need is help.  And love.  And someone to bathe the children and get them to bed so we can shiver and sweat till our fever breaks.